Friday 1 April 2011 14.00 EDT
First published on Friday 1 April 2011 14.00 EDT

A pattern has emerged among the best sides. In the field they regard the last 10 overs of the innings, when the opposition batsmen are obliged to open their shoulders and go for quick runs, as an opportunity to win the game. Ordinary teams dread this period of play, fearing batting mayhem, runs galore, bowling figures ruined, defeat more or less guaranteed.

Sri Lanka, under the calm, shrewd guidance of Kumar Sangakkara, have excelled in this phase of the game. Their bowlers appear to relish the challenge of bowling "at the death" and we are no longer talking only of Muttiah Muralitharan, who bows out of international cricket after this World Cup.

Occasionally the great players can tinker with fate; they can orchestrate their exit in the grand manner, but only occasionally. In 1983 Clive Lloyd in his World Cup swansong at Lord's promoted himself up the batting order to No4 in the final against India, so meagre was the West Indies' target. It was so tempting to end his career centre stage, but most of us can recall how that particular drama came to an end (West Indies were sensationally bowled out for 140 by India).

In Mumbai Today tomorrow it is just possible that it will boil down to a famous duel between two giants of their generation, Sachin Tendulkar and Muralitharan, to decide the destination of the World Cup. But cricket rarely delivers the cosy, eagerly anticipated climax that sends the sentimentalists into ecstasy. Who knows? It may well be the prosaic Gautam Gambhir or Munaf Patel, who step forward as India's match-winners while there is every chance that someone other than Muralitharan will be Sri Lanka's ace.

In the past Muralitharan has been burdened, albeit happily, with the tag of Sri Lanka's sole bowling match-winner, the role that Richard Hadlee performed for New Zealand for a decade. But now they have at least two other match-winners, which is probably just as well since Muralitharan is currently hopping up to the stumps on one leg and, as many legendary bowlers do at the end of their careers, relying more on bluff than fizz.

Sangakkara has other trumps to play, although he has lost the option of the injured Angelo Mathews. First, there is the amazing Lasith Malinga, a testament to the Sri Lanka coaching regime, which had the wit not to interfere when he came along.

Provided the batsman can locate the ball upon release Malinga is not so much of a threat with the new ball, which is why Sangakkara uses him so sparingly at the start. But at the end of the innings with the batsmen in a hurry and the ball reverse-swinging, Malinga can be devastating. He varies his pace, he bowls cutters and the odd bouncer, but his speciality is that in-swinging yorker. Malinga's yorker may even be more deadly than Joel Garner's, who mastered that delivery for one-day cricket more than two decades ago. It certainly comes from a different trajectory. Garner bowled the ball from a height of at least 10 feet; Malinga delivers from about five feet and this might be to his advantage.

Think of trying to slide the ball underneath a crack at the bottom of a door; the margin for error has to be greater, the lower the height from which the ball is released. Not that Malinga needs too much of a margin, even though he delivers in a manner that looks more likely to endanger the umpire's left ear than the toes of the batsman at the other end.

Malinga is a wonderful, one-off cricketer and Ajantha Mendis is pretty unusual as well. He bowls at a rapid pace for a spinner, flicking the ball mysteriously out of his hand and capable of spinning it either way. He delivers more off-breaks than leg-breaks and batsmen have started to play him, as they did Anil Kumble, like an off-cutter/inswinger bowler. But he can go the other way. Thus Mendis can pick up wickets rapidly when batsmen start swinging. Witness the way he polished off the Kiwi tail in the semi-final. It is hard to swing with conviction when you are not sure which way the ball is going to bounce.

This is why fortunate captains have kept Saeed Ajmal, Harbhajan Singh and Murali (all possessors of the doosra) as well as Imran Tahir and Mendis (often categorised as leg-spinners) at their disposal for some of those late overs. The wondrous ability of these bowlers to deceive explains why the so-called "happy hour" at the end of the innings has often been a miserable experience for so many batsmen in this tournament.